The actor Warren Beatty, the hapless star of the most spectacular and public fiasco in the history of the Oscars, recalls as “chaos” the night he handed the wrong envelope to Faye Dunaway and she announced the wrong winner of the best film award.

In an interview with Graham Norton to be broadcast tonight, Beatty also compares the urge to make another film with the need to vomit – building up slowly and finally inescapable.

On the night of the Oscars, as Beatty went on stage to join Dunaway at the climax of the long ceremony, he was handed the wrong envelope by a member of the PricewaterhouseCoopers accountancy firm, who operated the supposedly foolproof system for counting and announcing the votes.

The theatre packed with Hollywood royalty – and millions watching on television across the world – saw him open the envelope and look puzzled, then hand it to Dunaway, who announced that La La Land had taken the coveted film of the year award.

The La La Land team was on stage accepting the award when, after a frantic background exchange of envelopes, it was announced that the Oscar had gone to Moonlight. PwC, which had managed the awards for 83 Oscar ceremonies, later issued an apology for “human error”.

“I guess you could say it was chaos,” Beatty told Norton.

The star of films including Bonnie and Clyde, Shampoo, and Reds, which he also co-wrote and directed, is about to return to the big screen after a gap of 15 years in Rules Don’t Apply, playing the eccentric tycoon and film director Howard Hughes.

Beatty said his family with actor Annette Bening had been more of a draw than any of the scripts he had been offered recently: “We have four kids who are all more interesting to me than any 50 movies, but now we are approaching the empty nest period I’m maybe going to make some movies.”

He added: “I have sometimes compared it to vomiting. I don’t like to vomit and I rarely vomit, but something builds up, you think about it for a long time, you try to avoid it, but finally you think you will feel better if you go ahead and throw up.”

He is almost as famous for the roles he has rejected as for the films he has made, including Superman. “I was offered it, but I didn’t think it was a good idea to put a comic strip into a movie,” he said. “They were insistent I think about it so I got my assistant to go out and buy me some long underwear. I put them on, looked at myself in a full-length mirror and picked up the phone to say, ‘Just forget it’.”

In his younger days his social life meant he was never far from Hollywood gossip columns. He told Norton he did not know if Carly Simon’s 1972 hit You’re So Vain – chorus “You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you” – was about him.